


Totem

by scioscribe



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Breathplay, Dom/sub, M/M, Post-Movie(s), Psychological Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-07
Packaged: 2018-12-04 20:04:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11562357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Details,” Arthur said.  “Precision.  Smoothness.”“Subtlety?” Saito said, raising his eyebrows.





	Totem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PhoenixFalls](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhoenixFalls/gifts).



“I suppose there isn’t much distinction in being the right hand of a stay-at-home father,” Saito said when he found Arthur waiting for him in the hotel lobby, so much a piece with the marble floors and elegantly-upholstered sofas that he seemed almost part of the furniture himself. Saito was glad to see him, which surprised him—it was like the beating of a bird’s wings inside his chest. Perhaps not pleasure, not genuine pleasure, but—anticipation.

“I’m not really the honorary uncle type,” Arthur said. “I did teach Pippa to color, once upon a time.”

“Perfectly inside the lines, I’m sure.”

Arthur said, “I thought you might be looking for someone useful.”

“Constantly,” Saito said. He started walking again and Arthur fell in beside him, his stride matching Saito’s perfectly, step for step. “Though I could say you come with bad memories. The first time I met you, you were trying to steal from me.”

“The first time I met you,” Arthur countered, “I got shot.”

“Only in a dream.”

Arthur shrugged. “It still hurt.”

“Maybe I don’t need a thief on my payroll.”

“Then I’m sure you’ll have quite a few people to let go. And anyway, I’m not a thief, at least not by vocation. I’m a professional, that’s all. I go where the work is.”

“And what _is_ your vocation?”

They were about to pass through the revolving door out onto the streets of Brussels and suddenly Arthur’s hand was at Saito’s throat, delicately tightening his tie. The pad of his thumb was a gentle pressure against the top button of his shirt. Then they were outside and Arthur’s hands were back at his sides.

“Details,” Arthur said. “Precision. Smoothness.”

“Subtlety?” Saito said, raising his eyebrows.

“Where required.”

The rain had stopped a few hours ago, but a fine mist still hung in the air, wrapping a kind of gauze around Arthur, like he was a figure in a dream. And was he? Beautiful young men did not often present themselves in three-piece suits in foreign cities, offering smooth, attentive discretion. He put his hand into his pocket and rubbed his thumb over the folded spare handkerchief there, feeling the exact fineness of the linen, just a degree rougher than anything ordinarily spun by a machine. No dream, then. Arthur was still waiting for an answer. His face was, if not passionless, completely composed.

“You’ll travel with me,” Saito said. “You’ll have to learn Japanese.”

“I’ve been taking lessons,” Arthur said, as if there were nothing Saito could ask of him that he could not see coming. He wondered if Arthur knew exactly how much that felt like a challenge.

* * *

Arthur learned Japanese remarkably quickly.

“I do get a full eight hours a night,” he said, with a flash of a smile that had some genuine recklessness in it, like a bit clenched between his teeth. Something he was confident he could hold. “Any city we go to has a place to dream in, if you know the right people. Eight hours on the first level of the dream is six days of continuous study per night.”

"And do you always know the right people?"

"If I don't, Yusuf does. And I know Yusuf."

Saito couldn’t comprehend giving up control of his own dream, not again—not even giving it up to some plan of his own devising, some software loaded with language instruction. He had—the memory of this was flimsy, like handling tissue paper—been unable to learn anything in limbo. His library had been filled with books where the words would smudge themselves out, leaving only isolated phrases visible, like islands in disordered surf. A poem here, a thinly-sketched and bare-bones draft of a favorite novel there. Books that, past the title page, had only summaries and endless blank pages that he lacked the knowledge to fill.

Eventually he had stopped going into the library at all and then, by the time Cobb had come for him, the door itself had disappeared. By then he had been well-practiced in forgetting.

He said, now, “Is that restful?”

“It’s all REM sleep,” Arthur said. “It’s restful enough.”

“You must have a fascinating teacher, then. To hold your attention that way.”

Another one of those smiles, distinctive as any totem in the way they transformed him from cut-glass fineness to something living and unpredictable. “I can’t complain.”

His flirtation, whatever he thought, was not especially subtle. Was Saito supposed to feel flattered by this? Unnerved? Possessive, even, as if this were Arthur’s invitation to step inside his dream one night and usurp his own position there? He enjoyed this interplay between implication and interpretation. And he enjoyed even more the way he could throw Arthur just slightly off-balance by refusing to rise to the bait even though it was so clear that he understood what was there for the taking.

Unused to being denied or not, Arthur seemed to understand intuitively that some degree of reticence was still what was asked of him, and he didn’t presume, didn’t make his offer bald and therefore less appealing.

One night, in Cape Town, they ate alone in a restaurant that Saito’s money had kept open past its usual closing time. It was deserted except for them, and their table was against a glass wall made glossily reflective by the black sky just outside of it. Saito motioned to the captured image of them, the parallel Saito with his hand likewise outstretched, the parallel Arthur with his fork raised and his eyes attentive.

“Projections,” Saito said.

Arthur laughed. “Yours or mine?”

He’d spent the dinner idly studying Arthur—the slight crinkles at the corners of his eyes that he was too young to have, or would have been too young for had it not been for a life spent squinting at blueprints and close-typed documents; the way his eyebrows lifted up just slightly as they approached his nose. He decided that he had exhausted all the pleasures of patience. He reached toward the window and touched the reflection of Arthur’s hand; subsumed it beneath his own. It would smudge.

“Mine,” Saito said, and then neither one of them said anything else, at least not to each other, until they were back in the hotel. Arthur stayed so close at his side that he might as well have been Saito’s own right hand, might as well have been a projection, some masturbatory fantasy. He didn’t check the handkerchief in his pocket: brushed right past it to lay his fingers against the key-card he used to unlock his room.

“This is nicer than mine,” Arthur said, looking around.

“Shouldn’t it be?” Saito said, amused. “I’m paying for both of them, and I enjoy self-indulgence.” He slid one finger underneath the lapel of Arthur’s jacket which, like Arthur’s room, was both cheaper than his own and something that seemed cheap only and exclusively in comparison to his own: he enjoyed that about Arthur, the way he suspected seeing Arthur like this was a privilege and luxury very few had enjoyed. He couldn’t feel Arthur’s heartbeat like this, but he could feel the rise and fall of his breathing. “Am I paying for this?”

Arthur’s breath remained steady. “This you can have for free.”

“But I like buying what I want.”

“You like to buy what you want because you like to own what you appreciate,” Arthur said. “Or what’s useful to you.”

“You’re both.”

Arthur shrugged, fleeting discomfort on his face, and then said, “You could own me, if you’d like.”

Saito answered him by testing him, drawing the perfect Windsor knot of his tie closer to his throat until his thumb and knuckle were flush with Arthur’s hot, reddened skin, still lightly smelling of cologne, a scent Saito didn’t recognize except as Arthur’s personal preference. He would like that to change, would like Arthur marked more recognizably as one of his own favorites. The tie was smooth, the fabric so soft it was almost slippery, as if his hands could have skidded and tightened still further, tightened dangerously. Arthur’s lips parted. Saito held the knot there with his right hand and placed his left against Arthur’s chest, feeling the rise and fall that had grown more shallow and, very slightly, more frantic.

He kissed Arthur’s open lips and felt Arthur try, even with Saito’s hand at his throat, to return the kiss as well as receive it.

Saito loosened his hold. “You’re quite remarkable.”

Arthur inclined his head.

“I suppose this is why you found me again?”

“My research on you _was_ pretty thorough,” Arthur said. “I had an idea. We like the same art too, for the record, except I think I like Auerbach more than you do. I thought I could recognize… something I liked the sight of.”

“And you supposed yourself irresistible.”

“No. Irresistible would only apply if I were trying to seduce you. I just made myself available. To—satisfy.”

As if he had no needs of his own. Well, he _had_ spent years lying for a living, building convincing fantasies to persuade people to give him what he wanted. He knew Saito liked the idea—knew that almost anyone would like the idea—that Arthur had tracked him down from sheer, disinterested eagerness to put his mouth on Saito’s cock and his knees on Saito’s floor. But Arthur was hardly unselfish. Even Dom had not asked him to go into the Fischer job knowing how badly it might go, even his own friend had thought he would dislike the risk.

So Arthur wanted. Wanted something more than to be of service. Wanted, Saito supposed, _this_ and _him_ , with exacting, flattering specificity.

Wanted to seduce but now, in this room, to deny it, to say he’d done nothing, been only a desirable object polished to a high sheen, customized to Saito’s own pleasure.

That was a fantasy he could enter into, but he was also weary of dreams; weary of pretending, which was something different from the subtlety he had once requested. He knew, though, how to go deeper than Arthur’s fantasy, how to go deeper even than his own. He wanted to break the beautiful, fragile glass of the evening until the blood on his hands—the heat of it and the way it filled up the whorls of his fingerprints—was the only totem he would need to know reality.

He kissed Arthur again, but kissing was not what he was interested in; it was only another way to shorten Arthur’s breath. And once more he tightened the tie. The quality of Arthur’s breath against Saito’s mouth changed, grew wilder.

“It must be intense,” Saito said, letting go of him, watching with cool approval the way Arthur’s hand floated up to his neck to pull at the knot of his tie to further ease the pressure on his throat--and then haltingly fell back down again, tie untouched. “I’m impressed by your endurance. And—by other things.”

He grazed his palm against the front of Arthur’s trousers and Arthur made a tight, pained noise, the flush on his face intensifying.

“It excites you.”

“Like I said, we have that in common,” Arthur said. His voice was a little ragged. “From different ends, of course. But I’ve always liked paradoxes.”

A little bit of death mixed in with his life.

“And I can do whatever I want to you?” He put his hand on Arthur’s throat directly now, without the intermediary of the tie, the polite alibi of fashion. Arthur’s skin was pale there; he would wear bruises well. Tastefully. “Whatever I can imagine?”

He watched Arthur’s eyes dart back and forth: REM sleep even while he was awake. Thousands of hours of Japanese inside his mind to make up the clarity with which he said, schoolroom perfect, “You’re not in a dream anymore.”

It was a challenge, Saito knew—to deny the fantasy in the language he must have known Saito would be most likely to dream him in, this improbable, elegant man with his willingness and razor-fine intelligence. It was a challenge, and as a challenge it was more reassuring than it would have been otherwise, because it showed the mind behind the dare: _believe me, whether or not you can ever have all the evidence._

Never, he thought wryly, had he resisted this much the idea that he was desired. It was time he went back to taking certain things for granted.

Yes—he did see it in Arthur’s eyes, now still, now fixed only on him. That for Arthur _he_ was the dream.

“Then come to bed,” Saito said, relenting.

They fell down in it together, the only spot of gracelessness he wanted to allow himself—that unwillingness to take his mouth and hands off Arthur to better maneuver—and Saito brought him off inside his trousers, not letting him remove them, not letting him undo even a single button. He brought Arthur out of his reserve and his dignity until he was a shaking, cursing mess in everything but his clothing, and then Saito at last gave him permission to come. This would work as a totem, he thought. Arthur’s face in this instant. Quite difficult to duplicate.

“Do you know how much these cost?” Arthur said finally.

He chuckled. “I’ll buy you something to make up for it.”

“A shipping line,” Arthur said, possibly not joking, and then he undressed him with a punctiliousness that crossed over occasionally into reverence. He removed Saito’s cufflinks and, when Saito's gesture indicated it, put them in his mouth, silencing his own whispered commentary as he ran his hands up and down Saito’s body.

He loved the feeling of Arthur touching him first through the layers of wool and cotton, his hands almost more rumor than physical presence, and then more closely, his mouth pressed to Saito’s cock through the thin silk fabric of his underwear, lips parted just enough for Saito to get the wetness of his tongue and the interruption of the cufflinks, the unfamiliar shape of them in this strange new context. And then finally, against nothing but his bare skin, Arthur’s touch, body on body, now seeming almost impossibly, feverishly hot. But when he changed positions to move against Saito, Saito felt the brush of Arthur’s clothes and caught his wrist.

“Undress now,” he said, “and spit out the cufflinks.”

“Where?” Arthur said, tucking them into his cheek to speak.

“Who cares?”

What he wanted was to see Arthur and only Arthur, now that Arthur’s nakedness would be for his benefit alone. And Arthur was as beautiful as he’d expected, lithe and compact, firm, supple. There was age to think about, perhaps. They would never be old men together.

Again, though, who could care?

So he enjoyed Arthur’s hands once again.

* * *

It took a year before Saito believed in it all enough to make the request he wanted to make.

“Are you sure?” Arthur said. “That’s a lot of faith to put in one person.”

“I could always have something on the side and you would never know,” Saito said. “Maybe there’s less faith there than you think.”

Arthur rolled over in bed to face him, disturbing Saito’s hand from where it had been tracing his back, the dip between his shoulder blades. His eyes were serious, evaluative, as if the offer itself were a maze he was trying to find his way to the heart of. It was unusual for him to not agree immediately and more unusual still for one of them to volunteer that kind of clarity of feeling.

“No, you trust me,” Arthur said. “Don’t you? Then I trust you. There’d be no reason to say it if you didn’t actually think you’d go through with it; as gestures go, there are simpler ones.”

“Is that a yes, then?” He could hear the irritation in his voice and he tried to soften it with another touch. Arthur's skin finer than the linen of the handkerchief. And he was telling the truth, he had indeed thrown it away.

Arthur just nodded.

Saito had already drawn the design—he had technically been drawing it for over a year, adding more and more elaboration, more and more traps and turns, ever since his return from the venture with Cobb. He was not Ariadne, to produce labyrinths at will and without effort. But the end result, what he showed the tattoo artist, was a complex interlocking set of briars and kanji, something that would have looked like a mess to anyone but him. Something that _was_ a mess, truthfully, except for how well he knew it. Intimately, better than any of the books he'd been unable to carry with him into limbo.

It was a picture no one else would know the relevance of or, past this night, ever even see. Only him and, of course, Arthur.

“It’s going to take hours,” the artist said.

“The things I do for love,” Arthur said with a slanting kind of smile, taking off his shirt.

“Your whole back.” She spread her hands wide. "It will hurt."

“He understands,” Saito said.

He stayed there the whole time, watching his design take form on Arthur’s skin, watching Arthur become what he’d most wanted, proof that he was not dreaming, and what he’d most needed, proof that he could trust the evidence of his own senses enough to know that Arthur would not betray him, would never give up the secret of what he was becoming. No. What he was already. Growing old once already had made Saito sentimental.


End file.
